PHP and PowerPoint

fieryfredo

Hi,
I'm currently developing a Tutorial site for the Java programming Language for my university degree final year project.

Most of the site's content is created in Microsoft PowerPoint. Now, I can get the files to show correctly in the browser window etc, my question is this: Is there a way of separating the text out of the powerpoint file using PHP (or another scripting language), say just parse through the powerpoint file and store the text in a variable/array which I can then manipulate, so I can pass the text to a text to speech interpreter.

Any attempts so far have ended in nonsense characters in the output.

Any help would be greatly appreciated plus you'd be helping a poor student!

feldon23

You're going to have to find if someone online has taken apart the powerpoint file format and written a website making some sense of it.

Jedi_Legend

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/alain20001003.php3

I think you can access PowerPoints through COM, but I have no experience with it personally.

bobthedog

Yeh - you can access it through COM, but it's gonna take a bit of work to get it. Firstly - you are gooing to need to be running your PHP on a windows box (since you want to access all thos lovely Powerpoint COM objects).

Secondly, you are definetly going to need all the powerpoint objects installed on your machine - which more or less means installing the latest version of Powerpoint on your server.

Lastly - you are going to need to have a lot of time deciphering which parts of the Powerpoint COM objects contain the information you are interested in. There is little (if any) documentation on any of this, and the last time I tried accessing some excel workbooks (not using PHP) it took an age to get hold of the right book, the correct cell range etc.

Anyhow - this will be a cool project if you get it going...

fieryfredo

All that talk of COM sounds a bit mad! I've never used it myself either.

I'm developing the site on a windows machine though I believe the final version will be put onto a linux/unix server for use by the university, so the COM and Microsoft route may be blocked.

I had hoped there was a simpler way to do this, maybe even through Javascript/VBScript if not with PHP 🙁

fieryfredo

bobthedog

The best way (and probably easiest way if you are not a C guru and just wanna knock up a quick solution) is to write an external program in VB. This will have direct access to the COM objects (again assuming that they are installed on the server machine) and you will also get a bit of assistance from the IDE's object browser (although - as I say - this is very badly documented, and most objects turn out to be generic object types which aint very helpful at all).

This you could call via [man]exec/man, or something nice like that, and just return the value you require.

Of course, this does depend on you using a windows server, or at least having somewhere to run a windows app from.